


The Constraint of Conscience

by ellen_fremedon



Category: Temeraire - Naomi Novik
Genre: M/M, Silence Kink, Tongues of Serpents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-25
Updated: 2011-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-28 02:25:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/302713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellen_fremedon/pseuds/ellen_fremedon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To be cowardly in this, to refuse to see it through, seemed more unmanly to Laurence than beginning it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Constraint of Conscience

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cimorene](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cimorene/gifts).



> I saw you asked for Laurence and Tharkay, and I couldn't resist writing a treat. Happy Yuletide!
> 
> Thank you to Sanj for beta.

  


"It is fine to say that some occupation will be found for us," said Temeraire, "but we have been put before to occupations we did not like." He cast an eye down to the _Allegiance's_ waist, where a group of convicts, some of them in irons, were being permitted to take exercise under the marines' supervision. He was trying to be circumspect, Laurence had no doubt, but even the slightest nod of his great head drew attention. Several of the convicts saw Laurence, enjoying the liberty of the dragondeck which, by all rights, he should not have had. One spat; the watching redcoat let it go.

Temeraire saw; Laurence patted his neck, and though he bristled, he said only "But not being a captain any longer, and taking no money from Government, it seems to me you are not obliged to do as they tell you." His voice was brightly cheery, and he almost succeeded in sounding untroubled. 

The same thought had scarcely left Laurence's mind since putting to sea, but it was no comfort to him. He was no stranger to the enforced idleness of smooth sailing, but in the Navy he had had duties beyond the momentary, and the chance of improving himself and his vessel. Even in the Corps, he had had the responsibility for his crew, duties beyond the immediate care of his dragon and his gear—and, when those were exhausted, the knowledge that his idleness was temporary, a respite between labors.

As was this, in its way: a pause between the duties of his treason and of its sentence, whatever that should turn out to be.

Surely they would put him to some task in Australia. He looked forward to it, as much as he could to anything; he was dull from want of exertion, and even the backbreaking toil of land-clearing would be to a purpose. His present uncertainty oppressed him, shrank the _Allegiance's_ vast frame around him until it felt as trammeling as his cell of a cabin.

"Government cannot _make_ me do anything I do not want to," Iskierka opined. "They tried to make me leave you and Laurence behind, but I did not heed."

"Then you should not accept wages anymore," Temeraire said—a more extreme position than he he would have taken, if Iskierka had not taken the opposite stance. "Or—or even cows, I suppose, if you will not do what you are asked in exchange."

Granby joined Laurence at the rail, queue streaming in the wind. "I've tried to tell her the same a hundred times," he said, below the dragons' hearing. "Maybe Temeraire can make her see it; she heeds him as much as anyone."

"Perhaps."

"Lord, Laurence, you needn't look so down. Whatever the governors set you at at first, you and Temeraire will make your own way. Why, I should not be surprised to see you a pillar of the colony in five years' time, with a farm or a mill or a ship of your own—and a pardon as well, I should think."

It may have been true—Australia was a growing country, and by willing labor a clever man might earn any of those things for himself, if he wanted them. Laurence did not know that he did. His life, by a stroke of fortune, had been spared him; if his freedom was also to be returned, it seemed unfitting to use it for something so small as a farm or a merchantman. And then he thought it smacked of pride, to consider such things beneath his attention: a livelihood, a home. Most men were never granted leisure to dream of more.

He was still frowning; Granby cocked his head quizzically, and Laurence answered his last point, which was the simplest. "I shall not ask for pardon. I do not regret my—treason—" he chose the blunter word because he could not in truth claim not to regret his actions, but the treason was the best part of his last year's work—"and I will not ask to be forgiven it."

Granby smiled sourly, a cynicism in the look that did not sit well on his open face. "Laurence," he said. "Do you think you'll be given a choice?"

  


~*~

  


Laurence hoped to let the matter rest there; but over cards that night, Tharkay again raised the spectre of desertion, though the word made him lay his hand down and sigh. 

"Laurence. Your sentence is not a particularly onerous duty. You are no longer in the service, and you are bound by no oaths. And it is a large world, and England not the only power in it."

"The number of powers that can bring a dragon transport into Botany Bay is rather smaller." Laurence rifled his own hand; he was going to lose again.

"That is a logistical answer to a philosophical question," Tharkay said. "Well, and if you will not serve another power, why should you not enter the crown's service again, if they should ask? It is not unlikely they will repent of sending away their only Celestial, if this current campaign fails to put Bonaparte down."

Granby had made the same suggestion in a bid to cheer Laurence, and he had had to meet it with some semblance of cheer. Tharkay said it calmly, as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world, and it brought up all the anger Laurence had swallowed on the dragondeck. "I cannot serve at my own whims! It is one thing to break with the service—all of it, as a whole—over a matter of conscience, but I cannot then go back hat-in-hand and ask if they have some manner of serving that suits me better."

Tharkay, damn the man, only smiled. "I understand Iskierka plans to do exactly that."

"Iskierka may do as she likes,"  Laurence muttered. Tharkay said only "Piquet," and gathered the cards in one scar-scored hand.

  


~*~

  


Riley had given Laurence the freedom of the dragondeck, but he did not invite Laurence to his cabin; whether sparing Laurence the awkwardness of being unable to return his hospitality, or sensitive of Laurence's condition and all the reasons a captain could not entertain a prisoner, Laurence was not sure. They spoke, when they spoke at all, on the dragondeck. 

Tharkay continued to invite him, almost every night, for cards and for food and drink from his own none-too-great stock, pressing him in terms that did not admit of refusal. Laurence thought Riley seemed grateful to him for his hospitality, though he seldom accepted it himself, keeping Laurence at arm's length even on the neutral ground of Tharkay's small room off the great cabin. But it did not improve Tharkay's standing among  Riley's officers.

Tharkay affected not to notice, or at least not to mind. It was likely, Laurence supposed, that Lord Purbeck at least might have been as cool to Tharkay on account of his skin, even had he not kept such disreputable company. Tharkay had once explained—in Istanbul, which now seemed a lifetime away—how he preferred to let such people think the worst of him, rather than scrape for such shreds of regard as they might allow him to earn.

Laurence brought that conversation up one evening, hanging far off the Guinea cost hoping to avoid Tswana patrols. "You told me once, that you preferred to be constrained only by your own conscience."

"I still do," Tharkay said.

"How do you—" Laurence did not even know how to ask. "Admiral Roland told me, after my arrest," he said, "that I might have spread the cure and left none the wiser. Should I—it seemed to me that if the thing must be done, it would have been worse to do it furtively. To act ashamed. But it was treason in either case; and in either case, it was necessary. Was it conscience, that drew that line? Or mere delicacy of feeling?"

Tharkay sighed. The open window—no mere porthole but a glassed-in casement, part of the great cabin's wide sweep—fed the sound back hundredfold, in the sough of sea from below and the plaint of rigging from above. "Laurence, does it matter? You made the choices that left you best able to live with yourself. Call that constraint on your soul conscience or convention or the voice of God if you will; it is all one."

Laurence had not lived comfortably with himself, with any of his choices, since last year's interview with the Admiralty board. "And yet every choice I have made since taking the cure to France has gone ill—no.  I have chosen ill. I've turned my hands to work that sickens me."

"Do you mean to tell me that, in your career in two services, you had never before followed an order that turned your stomach?" Tharkay said. "Is your slaughter with the irregulars so much worse than harrying civilian shipping? Than having men flogged bloody for drunkenness, or hanged for buggery? Or is it just the worst choice you made since discovering you had the option of disobedience?"

"How can you be so damned calm about it?" Laurence snapped, and then sat back, stunned and abashed, more by the vehemence of his reaction than by the language. Tharkay only rose and shut the windows—a token gesture only, there being no privacy at sea except through a conspiracy to ignorance, but it touched Laurence sufficiently to douse his anger as fast as it had overtaken him. "I apologize. I cannot see where my duty lies anymore, or whether I have any duties left to me, and in the absence of occupation I begin to fear that my own conscience is not strong enough to guide me to some fitting work. And even if I can live rightly by its constraints alone, it seems to me a terribly lonely life."

He looked up, hands spread on his knees, to see the color drain from Tharkay's face.  "Lonely it may be, I suppose," he said, lightly, "but I have not found it empty, of work or reward or pleasant society. And, Laurence, it ill accords with friendship to treat the best circumstance I may aspire to as an unthinkable insult to your own condition."

Truly abashed now, Laurence got out another, rougher apology—it was true, Tharkay always had the truth of it, in these matters—he was even more deeply in the man's debt. Tharkay, in welcome interruption, waved away his apology, saying "Selfishness, on my part, and stubbornness. I would rather amend your behavior than my own esteem, where they are out of agreement."

"I am grateful for your esteem, I assure you," Laurence said, and on impulse took Tharkay's hand across the table, "though I do not know what I have done to deserve it."

"No," Tharkay said, looking down at their hands. "No, you don't."

It should have stung, but there was no malice on Tharkay's part, and on Laurence's, no understanding. Tharkay clasped his hand and let it drop, and looked up again with a fierce defiance in his eyes; and it was that determination, the brazen refusal of shame or apology, that told Laurence what Tharkay thought he had given away.

"Or perhaps you do." His voice was flat, and weary, but still fond. "In any case, I beg you not to speak of this." His hand made an abortive move towards Laurence's, still resting palm-up and open on the table, and then fell to his side. Laurence clambered to his feet, made his adieux without a handshake, but he could still feel the warmth of Tharkay's strong grip, all the way back to his bare and fetid cabin.

  


~*~

  


In the Navy, Laurence had often felt the ship an extension of his own body, felt the tremors of the timber in his own bones,  his weathered face turning to find the wind with all the quick responsiveness of the sheets. That night in his cot, the next day pacing the dragondeck, he learned the inverse of that feeling; the decks and bulkheads, even the unbroken circle of the horizon, seemed to contract to the radius of his own skin, to encage him in a body that felt suddenly too tight, clumsy and ill-fitting; hardly like an object of desire.

He asked for, and received, permission to take Temeraire aloft, and that was better. The wind buffeted them both, whipping his hair and chapping his face, tossing Temeraire's long facial tendrils and bellying his wings to an almost painful stretch. "Dear heart, what should _you_ like to do in Australia?"

 "There will be very few dragons there," Temeraire said. "But perhaps I might write—to our friends in England, with advice for all the dragons there."

The Corps, Laurence knew, would be charged to keep any sedition of Temeraire's from spreading. But England was not the only power. He squelched the dangerous thought. "I am sure they would be happy to hear from you. Nothing else?"

Temeraire looked back over his shoulder. "I  should—if it is possible, I should like to have a pavilion. I can do all but the carpentry myself; and I have several ideas for plans."

"I should like to see them." 

Temeraire called for his reading frame, and sent Emily scurrying for his papers before Laurence could remind him that she was not actually his crew anymore. It was a fine pavilion, and Laurence admired it, and took up a pen and made emendations to Temeraire's instructions, but it was not the distraction that flying was.

He had never entertained such thoughts—not of Tharkay, not of himself. But he could think of little else now. Laurence had never been able to separate the act, in his mind, from its surroundings—lawbreaking, no privacy, the furtiveness and lies such circumstances must lead to; and in the event of discovery, separation, shame, blackmail and worse secrets at best and the gallows looming over all. It was nothing a man would choose, if he had a choice, and he was not one of those wretches Nature had shaped for nothing else: inclination, and the circumstances of birth and career, had suited him for a husband—a fair catch, even, before his change of service. Awareness of his fortune had kept him chaster than rumor would paint a Navy captain, and had made him as lenient as regulation would allow on the foibles of men who could not look forward to a settled marriage, whether the whorings of those poor devils who would never scrape more than a night's support for the most desperate of women, or the intrigues of men of all ranks whose own natures barred them from women's company.

He had nothing to offer a woman now; but as for the rest, nothing had changed: they could have no privacy, no safety, no hope of future or ease.

Nothing had changed, except Laurence himself: alone at night, belowdecks, he listened for the creak of the door and knew he would let Tharkay in if he came; would embrace him, for the warmth and companionship of his presence.

He rolled his blanket around his arm and went up to the dragondeck. Lord Purbeck frowned expansively, but Riley had evidently told him to allow Laurence this liberty as well, and he said nothing, though it was clear that by taking it unasked, Laurence had confirmed Purbeck's low opinion.

"Laurence," Temeraire whispered, at a level that still carried all the way to the quarterdeck, "are you well?"

 "Hush, love. I'm quite well; I merely fancied some fresh air." He curled up in the curve of Temeraire's arm, and in time the dragon's slow breathing sent him to sleep.

  


~*~

  


He could not avoid Tharkay forever, even on a ship the size of _Allegiance_ —and, in truth, he had no wish to; he could not afford to turn away a friend, and certainly not for such a cause. Tharkay would not press himself on Laurence unwanted.

And yet in this as well, Laurence no longer knew what he did want. The sight of Tharkay's hands recalled their touch; his movement conjured up the body that Laurence had seen with perfect equanimity—and yet marked far more than he had thought, for it came vividly to mind now. His shoulders were broad and well-made; a puckered burn scar ran along the muscle of his thigh.

Tharkay's manner was no different—as why should it be? He was accustomed to hiding his regard, to acting unaffected—but Laurence caught himself, more than once, staring. He blushed when Tharkay met his eyes over the card table, the next night they were alone together, but he made no attempt to hide his thoughts.  


Tharkay met his gaze, long enough that Laurence felt stripped bare; and that was all. He kept, scrupulously, to his side of the table, not even leaning as he once would have to refill Laurence's glass or deal the cards. But "I have never," Tharkay said, over the last hand, "offered you my given name. It is Tenzing; I would be honored if you would use it."

"The honor is mine," Laurence said. "Tenzing."

  


~*~

  


It became another layer to their friendship; submerged, but not unknown. It was in some ways a comfort, to know himself still enough a part of humanity to be desired, even loved; but—though they still spoke freely on every other issue— it took away the comfort of their ethical discussions.

Alone with his desire, Laurence was more adrift even than before. He wondered some nights whether he had lost all respect for law, of god or man; whether he had pushed his conscience at last to breaking-point. And then he thought it petty of himself to stick at this: that having taken on the name of traitor—and of murderer, despite in the last defense of home—it was a quibbling niceness of spirit that scrupled only at taking that of sodomite.

For himself, he would have damned all scruples, and all dangers. His own life was forfeit; if it had been spared him, that made it his, to use as he would. But he would not involve another—involve Tenzing—in his ruin; there was nothing for it but to respect Tharkay's silence, and burn in peace.

Even that—even the unescapable awareness of a growing desire, with no end and no satisfaction in sight—was, in some ways, a balm; it turned the sense of confinement, the physical oppression that grew in him the closer they came to Australia, into a more immediate and human-sized discomfort, one that a fast flight or a drenching in spray had a chance of banishing.

  


~*~

  


Running far off the Cape, they were overtaken by a gale. Laurence was on deck with the first blow, to chain the dragons—even Temeraire did not dispute the necessity, so high were the winds—and, with that duty accomplished, grabbed a rope, for all the _Allegiance_ 's heavy spread of sail would need to come down if her spars—irreplaceable, with the Cape in unfriendly hands—were to weather the storm.

Rain blew in, horizontal and cutting. He saw Granby hauling at his side, Demane making fast a line with sailorly speed. Riley shouted an order that the wind whipped away; Laurence followed by instinct alone, and Granby followed Laurence's example, taking the end of the rain-slick line. The sheets came down, from the topgallants downward, men making one fast and swarming down the masts to reef and furl the next.

And then a line went slack in Laurence's hand, and looking up he saw the dangling spar, the white length of sail unspooling as it fell and draping the rigging below, catching the wind and spilling it again. Before he could think, he had given the line to Granby, taken an axe from the nearest hand, and surged aloft.

His hands were unused to the work now, and they threatened to slip at every step; every sinew felt the months of idleness. He climbed faster, feeling the mast strain at the trembling spar, bending under its weight of canvas and wind.

The broken spar came free of its lines with a few quick blows of the axe; but then the sail was loose, blowing and wrapping itself almost entirely around the spar below. Trailing rope tangled with the intact rigging, and a blow here might sever a needed line; this was slow work, on a beam that even in the wind he could feel groaning, trembling under his thighs like a horse ridden to exhaustion.

There was no saving the sail; the wind took it as soon as he had freed it from the nest of tangled rope. It nearly took Laurence with him; a last whipping end of line wrapped his wrist, and hauled him to his feet on the swaying spar. With a supreme effort, he caught the mast in his other arm and embraced it, drawing himself in and letting the wind take the rope—and the skin of his wrist, from the feel of it. It flew free, and the quality of the vibration evened, quieted; the tight-furled canvas could ride out the blow. The crisis was past.

Past, leaving him far above the deck, exhausted with effort and with the passing of the chance for action, for usefulness. It was a miserable business, shinning back down the shuddering mast, and made no better by Temeraire's anxiety, for he would strain at his chains stretching his neck to watch Laurence's progress. The instant Laurence was within his reach, he snatched him off the mast—one tooth neatly between Laurence's arm and side—and placed him on the rolling deck. "That was very clever," he bellowed, the sound heard more through the soles of the feet than through the sodden air, "but were there no sailors who could have done it?" He nudged Laurence with his great head, bowling him over—straight into Tharkay and Granby, waiting for him by the hatchway. "Now go below and get warm. I shall be fine here. I am not afraid."

"Never," Laurence tried to agree, but he could not even hear his own words over the gale. Granby and Tharkay helped him down the ladder, and Granby gave him a friendly shove at the bottom, in the direction of Tharkay's cabin. His mouth shaped words that might have been "dry clothes"; Tharkay was nearer Laurence's height and build than the lanky Granby.

He let Tharkay support him, and lead him into his cabin. Inside, he backed him against the door, speaking words Laurence could not hear. An exhausted spark of anger welled up—the risk had been his to take, had been well within his ability, had been necessary; Tharkay had no right to chastise him—but then Tharkay only kissed his mouth, hotly and roughly.

  


~*~

  


His heart beat in his ears, the only sound not whelmed by the gale. Tharkay's lips were hot, and abruptly Laurence was chilled through everywhere else. He seized Tharkay's shoulder and held him there, let himself be kissed, let himself be warmed through.

Laurence was the first to move his hands, down over Tharkay's back, the other tangling in his shirt, and at last searching out skin beneath the wet linen. Tharkay pulled away, but only long enough to bolt the door. The cot was swinging wildly; Tharkay drew Laurence back into his arms and pulled them both to the deck.

They kissed until Laurence was warm—peeling away his dripping clothes as they went—and then until he was sweating and flushed. A climax along the way was almost an afterthought—first Tharkay, shockingly warm against Laurence's thigh, when Laurence finally found the scar and traced its edge; he gripped Laurence's hip, clenched his teeth for a moment, hardly slackened his attentions, and Laurence came not much later. It was not nearly enough—his body had remembered the feeling of useful exertion, and now it clamored for every other feeling. He clung to Tharkay in desperation and Tharkay stripped him of the last of his clothing and worried his flesh with teeth and nails. Laurence, boneless but still yearning, had neither energy nor will to object; he lay loose and heavy in Tharkay's arms and submitted. And, as the life returned to him, made a choice, owned it, and began to match Tharkay touch for touch: tongue to his collarbones, hands on his belly, legs intertwining.

Laurence had long stopped even hearing the wind when Tharkay, at last, pinched a bit of warm tallow from the candle in its reflector and daubed it in glistening trails down his shaft. Laurence averted his eyes by habit, then caught himself and looked his fill, brazenly: Tharkay's strong, scarred fingers, and the red flesh between them. He knew what came next; and he spread his legs for it with an alacrity that he thought would shame him when he looked back on it.

He knew what, but not how. Tharkay's member pressed at him, impossible either to evade or to admit, a slow unavailing pain that neither built nor ebbed. Tharkay caught his face in his hand; Laurence opened his eyes at the touch, unaware of having closed them, and forced himself to meet Tharkay's questioning look; the man was already drawing away, muscles shifting in the arm that held him.

To be cowardly in this, to refuse to see it through, seemed more unmanly to Laurence than beginning it; he strained after Tharkay's body, and against him, and that return of pressure for pressure answered where a desperate yielding had not; he gave way, and Tharkay was inside him.

And yet not entirely; the act of penetration was not all done at a stroke, or else that first stroke was incomprehensibly slow, even with all Laurence's senses bent on following this single sensation, the inexorable opening of his body to that unbending pressure. There was nothing else, could surely be nothing more; and then the burn abated, and Tharkay's breath was suddenly warm in his face: they lay still, joined as deep as they might be, the thing accomplished.

Before, with Tharkay holding his gaze and waiting his decision, Laurence had thought only of putting the life that was his, the body that still breathed despite the laws of man and nature, to a use that neither conscience nor law could compel. He had followed his will with no thought of further pleasure; but then Tharkay moved upon him and he could think of nothing else—a shocking sensation, tightly circumscribed and yet everywhere at once, nothing like he had imagined but showing up, by its very strangeness, the specificity of his imaginings. Tharkay's body, intimately known and yet strange as well, sweat-damp and salt-stained, pinned him to the floorboards. Laurence groped for skin, clasping him shoulder and hip; they shuddered together, breathing each into the other's ears, and Laurence strained upward to kiss Tharkay's mouth.

Tharkay reached between them to stroke his member. Laurence had almost forgotten that he owned this pleasure, but it was his, and as urgent as the other was timeless. He jerked his hips up into Tharkay's grasp, and Tharkay, with almost the same startlement, reared back and thrust in earnest. From there they neither lasted long, rutting fiercely on the deck planks, clothes bundled and clotted beneath them, the candle's shadows listing drunkenly across the cabin. Laurence's climax started within him, seizing the roots of his member and dragging at his skin from the inside. Blood pounded, feet and temples and a thousand pulses in between; he felt grown too immense for his body to contain, and he was: he spilled in a long and wrenching crisis into Tharkay's tight hand. With arms and body, he returned the clasp; Tharkay, grimacing, thrust again, more raggedly and quick. There was pleasure in it still, beyond what Laurence thought could be borne—the roughness breaking some last resistance, dredging out some final store of ecstasy from within him. He swallowed down a cry, not knowing how many others he had released into the howling storm; and Tharkay gasped and fell heavy into Laurence's arms.

They held each other for a long time, kicking away the wreckage of their clothes to fit their legs together. Laurence ached exquisitely, less from Tharkay's usage than from his own enthusiastic response, in his back and thighs; Tharkay gentled the muscles with warm, heavy hands. Laurence drowsed under his touch, until woken—all at once, with a sailor's quick alertness—by silence.

The gale was over. The silence rang in Laurence's abused ears.  Tharkay, awake as well, still lay draped over him, watching. His regard was steady and impassive as ever: their relations had not altered, would not.

Laurence's own countenance, he was certain, hid nothing: not his relief, that they could go on as before; nor his awareness that the desires which had brought them to this had been only slaked for a time, not quenched.

"Tenzing—" he began

Tharkay shook his head, once, a warning, and without a word he leaned in and kissed Laurence, deep and sweet. When it ended, his whole body drew away. "Say nothing, I beg you."

  


~*~

  


Laurence said nothing, through the few days of distance that followed, or the renewed and deepened friendship that suceeded it. There was nothing to say.

But Tharkay began, through the obliquest of hints, to suggest that he had a purpose in Australia. He had a letter, from a Company ship bound for Batavia, and showed it to no one, but after it came he was busy with a flurry of writing, and he began accepting more of Riley's invitations. 

Whatever charge he had been given, Laurence knew he might have concealed it entirely. His laxity was for Laurence's benefit, and for his own—to remind them both that he had not simply followed Laurence to the end of the earth out of his own devotion. Though Laurence wondered whether he had known the order would come, or had merely hoped and taken ship with nothing settled but his own feelings.

He could not and would not ask. But as they approached Australia, he was at last settled in his own mind—he was still the same man, and he would meet whatever waited for him. Being a traitor, being forsworn, had not stripped away away his conscience or his choices—he had chosen to slaughter without quarter, and known it for a wrong, a sin; and now he had chosen to lie with a man, and knew it, perhaps, for a sin, perhaps a wrong—but, as with his treason, the rightest and only choice to make.

The last night out from Van Dieman's Land, Tharkay looked up across the card table and then abruptly lifted the table away and stood before the locker where Laurence sat. He looked down into his face—and, satisfied with whatever he saw there, gently laid his hand over Laurence's mouth. "Say nothing," he murmured, and knelt on the bare planks.

The windows were open to the clear tropical night, and in the stillness the smallest sound would carry far across the water; all night they had heard snatches of speech and footfalls from all through the ship. Tharkay drew back his hand and placed it on Laurence's thigh, and Laurence pressed his own fist to his mouth in its place, while Tharkay laid open his trousers and lowered his head.

This pleasure, he had had, but never like this, with every wet noise of Tharkay's mouth ringing loud in his ears and echoed by the lapping of the sea. He strained after every sound, and Tharkay's touches fell on his softest skin as on a drumhead. It could not go on—it was more than he could bear in silence, and yet he did; when at last he spent into Tharkay's mouth, his whole frame collapsed from the effort of silence. Tharkay was there to catch him, holding him up with a strong hand on his thigh and his mouth at Laurence's collarbone, inside his undone neckcloth and open collar. Laurence held his head to his breast, muffling his ragged breathing in Tharkay's hair. It was damp at the roots with sweat, and his face was hot.

Laurence held him until, with a grimace, he hauled Laurence to his feet and groped for his hand. Laurence clasped it, firm and greedy, a lifeline; Tharkay laughed silently into his shoulder and brought their clasped hands to his member. Laurence flushed—of course—and, encouraged by the look of relief that crossed Tharkay's face, let go just enough to fully grasp this hotter and softer flesh. Tharkay folded his hand around Laurence's and guided his strokes—not many, before he staggered against Laurence drunkenly and spent in his hand. Laurence took his weight, until he was steady on his feet again, and that was that; Tharkay offered Laurence a clean handkerchief and replaced the card table, and they returned to the game.

At its end, when he left for his own dank cell, Laurence kissed Tharkay at the door, gently and knowing it would be the last.

  


~*~

  


And for a long time, it was. Even, months later, at their farewell dinner, Laurence had no intention to attempt a renewal of intimacy in Tharkay's thin-walled rented lodgings. But they could at last speak somewhat freely—though, on the subject of Tharkay's upcoming voyage, he knew few enough particulars to share.

"Will you have a chance to remember me to Sara Maden? Or, Maden that was; I suppose she's changed her name. I should not like to place you in a difficult position, but I do owe her a debt of gratitude, for Istanbul."

Tharkay drowned a sour smile in his wineglass. "I have a regrettable tendency to jealousy, I know," he said. "But I hope I have learnt to keep such feeling from interfering with proper behavior, where I know I have no possible claim." He met Laurence's eyes, and lifted the glass to him.

Laurence raised his own, and drank. "You have, I hope you know, a claim to my friendship. I am—wherever the years take you, I will always be—glad of it, glad that we found our way to terms of some intimacy." 

"I wish I could be gladder to have a friend mouldering in Australia," Tharkay said. "But a friend all the same."

"Tenzing. I have no wish to be a privateer, not for the Company or the crown or any other master. The thought is well-meant, and my rejecting it is in no way a rejection of you, or of your society. I would there were some other way I might have your fellowship. But I find my conscience does not allow me to put myself, and Temeraire, to the only work my country would have me do."

"Ah." Tharkay refilled their glasses. "You do remember what you once said, about the life constrained only by conscience."

"It promises to be very nearly as lonely as I had feared," Laurence allowed.

"Only nearly?"

"No more so than yours."

"And you can no more turn aside from it than I can. Well." He reached across the table and clasped Laurence's hand, the pressure more intimate than a kiss. Laurence held on; and from outside came the crackle of gunfire. They sprang away, reaching for their weapons.

"That's nearby."

"The governor's house?" Tharkay was already at the door, but he stopped just inside, and stopped Laurence with a hand on his chest. "My ship sails with the tide. If you have the chance, meet me back here before dawn, and I will say a proper farewell. If you do not—" He drew Laurence close and kissed him, brief but soundly. "If you do not, let that stand for now."

"Until next time," Laurence agreed, and followed Tharkay out the door and into the streets, toward the shooting.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [The Constraint of Conscience (podfic)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/318186) by [susan_voight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/susan_voight/pseuds/susan_voight)




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